4 ms·

I did something similar a while back to the @fesshole Twitter/Bluesky account. Downloaded the entire archive and fine-tuned a model on it to create more unhinge

I did something similar a while back to the @fesshole Twitter/Bluesky account. Downloaded the entire archive and fine-tuned a model on it to create more unhinged confessions. Was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I realised that all I’d done was teach an innocent machine about wanking and divorce. Felt like that bit in a sci-fi movie where the alien/super-intelligent AI speed-watches humanity’s history and decides we’re not worth saving after all.

falcor84 1y ago
What's wrong with wanking and divorce? These are respectively a way for people to be happier and more self-reliant, and a way for people to get out of a situation that isn't working out for them. I think both are net positives, and I'm very grateful to live in a society that normalizes them.
- dcuthbertson 1y ago
  The innocent machine can't do either. It's akin to having no mouth, but it must scream (apologies to Harlan Ellison)
  - falcor84 1y ago
    That is a fair point, but it would then apply to everything else we teach it about, like how we perceive the color of the sky or the taste of champagne. Should we remove these from the training set too? Is it not still good to be exposed to the experiences of others, even if one cannot experience these things themself?
    - dcuthbertson 1y ago
      Thanks for saying it's a fair point, but it's more of an offhand joke about "an innocent machine". In reality, a machine, even an LLM, has no innocence. It's just a machine.
      - pixl97 1y ago
        Gets a bit more complicated when we start giving these machines agency.
      - falcor84 1y ago
        Having studied biology, I never accepted the "just a machine" argument. Everything is essentially a machine, but when a machine is sufficiently complex, it is rational to apply the Intentional Stance to it.
- pc86 1y ago
  I'm not implying that divorce should be stigmatized or prohibited or anything, but it is bad (necessary evil?) and most people would be much happier if they had never married that person in the first place rather than married them then gotten divorced. So "normalize divorce" is pretty backward when what we should be doing is normalizing making sure you're marrying the right person.
  - cgriswald 1y ago
    Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized. I’d have never even known my ex wasn’t the right person if I hadn’t married her. I didn’t come out of my marriage worse off. Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Eh, I would say it's quite a bit more complicated than you're giving it credit for. >Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized. Absolutely not. I live in the southern US and we have the culmination of "Young people should get married" coupled with "divorce is bad/evil" and the disincentivization of actually learning about human behaviors/complications before going through something that could be traumatic. There are a lot of relationships that from an outside and balanced perspective give all the signs they will not work out and will be potentially dangerous for one or both partners in the relationship.
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        Yeah and the "sex before marriage is bad" thing makes it even harder to experiment and find a partner that really suits.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > I didn’t come out of my marriage worse off This is good for you, but many people do come out of their marriages much worse off in various ways > Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil It's not bad or evil, but let's also not pretend that it isn't damaging
- adamc 1y ago
  Having gone through a divorce... no. It would be better if people tried harder to make relationships work. Failing that, it would be better to not marry such a person.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    People sometimes grow in different directions. Sometimes the person who was perfect for you at 25 just isn't a good fit for you at age 40, regardless of how hard you try to make it work.
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    The state of having married the wrong person, will always occur. To stigmatize divorce is to put people who made the wrong choice once in a worse spot. Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health. At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      > Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health. > At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work. And most importantly, knowing when to do the one or the other. I think this thought that divorce is bad comes from religion which would end up having to care for abandoned kids (especially when contraception didn't exist so having kids wasn't as much of a choice) I don't really hear it so much here in Europe except from very religious people. Most people are totally ok with divorce, many aren't even married (I myself never married and I had a gf for 12 years from a Catholic family who also didn't mind at all) and a lot of them are even polyamorous :) I have a feeling that would not go down so well in rural America.
      - 1y ago
nthingtohide 1y ago
> an innocent machine about wanking and divorce Let's say you discovered a pendrive of a long lost civilization and train a model on that text data. How would you or the model know that the pendrive contained data on wanking and divorce without anykind of external grounding to that data?
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  This is much more concise than my usual attempts to explain why LLMs don’t “know” things. I’ll be stealing it. Maybe with a different example corpus, lol.
  - moate 1y ago
    I think it only fair to leave that in for posterity. Where would we be without wanking and divorce after all?
    - harry8 1y ago
      Sexually fulfilled?
  - nthingtohide 1y ago
    I actually I fashioned this logic out of the philosophy question of why certain neural firings appear as sound in our brain while others appear as vision? What gives?
    - wfn 1y ago
      iirc there were some experiments where they rewired optic nerve and inner ear in mice to route (so to speak) to different areas of the brain (different cortical (i think?) destinations), and iirc the higher level biological structures of those areas were built up accordingly (regular visual cortex like neural structures for visual data, etc.) iirc was done on very young baby mice or somesuch (classic creepy stuff, do not remember which decade; Connectionism researchers). does not answer the general good abstract question and "how semantics possible thru relative context / relations to other terms only?", but speaks to how different modalities of information (e.g. visual data vs. sound data) are likewise represented, modelled, processed, etc. using different neural structures which presumably encode different aspects of information (e.g. layman obvious guess - temporality / relation-across-time-axis much more important for sound data).

falcor84 1y ago

What's wrong with wanking and divorce? These are respectively a way for people to be happier and more self-reliant, and a way for people to get out of a situation that isn't working out for them. I think both are net positives, and I'm very grateful to live in a society that normalizes them.

dcuthbertson 1y ago
The innocent machine can't do either. It's akin to having no mouth, but it must scream (apologies to Harlan Ellison)
- falcor84 1y ago
  That is a fair point, but it would then apply to everything else we teach it about, like how we perceive the color of the sky or the taste of champagne. Should we remove these from the training set too? Is it not still good to be exposed to the experiences of others, even if one cannot experience these things themself?
  - dcuthbertson 1y ago
    Thanks for saying it's a fair point, but it's more of an offhand joke about "an innocent machine". In reality, a machine, even an LLM, has no innocence. It's just a machine.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Gets a bit more complicated when we start giving these machines agency.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      Having studied biology, I never accepted the "just a machine" argument. Everything is essentially a machine, but when a machine is sufficiently complex, it is rational to apply the Intentional Stance to it.
pc86 1y ago
I'm not implying that divorce should be stigmatized or prohibited or anything, but it is bad (necessary evil?) and most people would be much happier if they had never married that person in the first place rather than married them then gotten divorced. So "normalize divorce" is pretty backward when what we should be doing is normalizing making sure you're marrying the right person.
- cgriswald 1y ago
  Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized. I’d have never even known my ex wasn’t the right person if I hadn’t married her. I didn’t come out of my marriage worse off. Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Eh, I would say it's quite a bit more complicated than you're giving it credit for. >Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized. Absolutely not. I live in the southern US and we have the culmination of "Young people should get married" coupled with "divorce is bad/evil" and the disincentivization of actually learning about human behaviors/complications before going through something that could be traumatic. There are a lot of relationships that from an outside and balanced perspective give all the signs they will not work out and will be potentially dangerous for one or both partners in the relationship.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      Yeah and the "sex before marriage is bad" thing makes it even harder to experiment and find a partner that really suits.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > I didn’t come out of my marriage worse off This is good for you, but many people do come out of their marriages much worse off in various ways > Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil It's not bad or evil, but let's also not pretend that it isn't damaging
adamc 1y ago
Having gone through a divorce... no. It would be better if people tried harder to make relationships work. Failing that, it would be better to not marry such a person.
- falcor84 1y ago
  People sometimes grow in different directions. Sometimes the person who was perfect for you at 25 just isn't a good fit for you at age 40, regardless of how hard you try to make it work.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  The state of having married the wrong person, will always occur. To stigmatize divorce is to put people who made the wrong choice once in a worse spot. Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health. At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    > Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health. > At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work. And most importantly, knowing when to do the one or the other. I think this thought that divorce is bad comes from religion which would end up having to care for abandoned kids (especially when contraception didn't exist so having kids wasn't as much of a choice) I don't really hear it so much here in Europe except from very religious people. Most people are totally ok with divorce, many aren't even married (I myself never married and I had a gf for 12 years from a Catholic family who also didn't mind at all) and a lot of them are even polyamorous :) I have a feeling that would not go down so well in rural America.
    - 1y ago

nthingtohide 1y ago

> an innocent machine about wanking and divorce Let's say you discovered a pendrive of a long lost civilization and train a model on that text data. How would you or the model know that the pendrive contained data on wanking and divorce without anykind of external grounding to that data?

alabastervlog 1y ago
This is much more concise than my usual attempts to explain why LLMs don’t “know” things. I’ll be stealing it. Maybe with a different example corpus, lol.
- moate 1y ago
  I think it only fair to leave that in for posterity. Where would we be without wanking and divorce after all?
  - harry8 1y ago
    Sexually fulfilled?
- nthingtohide 1y ago
  I actually I fashioned this logic out of the philosophy question of why certain neural firings appear as sound in our brain while others appear as vision? What gives?
  - wfn 1y ago
    iirc there were some experiments where they rewired optic nerve and inner ear in mice to route (so to speak) to different areas of the brain (different cortical (i think?) destinations), and iirc the higher level biological structures of those areas were built up accordingly (regular visual cortex like neural structures for visual data, etc.) iirc was done on very young baby mice or somesuch (classic creepy stuff, do not remember which decade; Connectionism researchers). does not answer the general good abstract question and "how semantics possible thru relative context / relations to other terms only?", but speaks to how different modalities of information (e.g. visual data vs. sound data) are likewise represented, modelled, processed, etc. using different neural structures which presumably encode different aspects of information (e.g. layman obvious guess - temporality / relation-across-time-axis much more important for sound data).